I’ve been trying to decide how to feel about Oppenheimer. Deciding how you feel isn’t simply a process of deciding how you feel internally, but how that feeling relates to external social structures. It’s a question of how one wishes to present themselves to history, to your friends and loved ones. The boundary of self, the shield of absolute terror, is powerful yet illusory, unlike the power of the atomic bomb, which feels illusory but is, in the final instance, wack!
I was distracted by too many ‘big’ actors, I don't mean Andre the giant, I mean that films are often coded in such a way as to target our attention onto key characters because they are played by the tent pole figures. The film is packed with very recognizable faces with only faintly recognizable names and personalities. As such I understand the film entirely as x’s character talking to y. With the exception of Albert Einstein, who for once isn’t talking about saving energy on a smart meter I don't have.
Perhaps neoliberalism wears the guise of history like a triumphal roman general wears the guise of Jupiter for a day. Perhaps? But to say such a thing falls far short of the pretentious level Oppenheimer aspires to.
‘Quantum physics is unintuitive’ is a platitude often mentioned in the film, probably because it’s a recurring meme in introduction to quantum physics talks. It’s the speaker's way of saying, “please don’t switch off then this doesn't make sense, it won’t for a while, you’re not expected to grasp it right away.” which is predicated on an assumption that there is something to be gasped.
I feel it was a bold directorial decision to import this unintuitive dynamic into the film itself, while also inverting it; using the mystical hand wavy language that usually side-lines a talk about complex mathematical topics, to side-line the structural elements of storytelling.
It’s 22nd July 2023, this scene is in black
and white, though it only exists as a text exchange on a messenger app. A
friend explains why we shouldn’t necessarily bother with Oppenheimer. He is
played by, (Googles actor) Oscar Isaac, but will only appear in this one scene.
His testimony in this closed session left Christopher Nolan reeling from the
psychic shock: when Nolan really wanted a public battering to martyr himself
to.
“Hard truths but I'm giving Oppenheimer a 3/10”
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“Someone
needed to tell Nolan to shut up”
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“Westworld
season 3 energy”
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“Also
I thought he was going to ride the bomb and go yee haw but he didn't do that
wtf”
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The only time I truly felt like I got a vivid feeling for the characters were during the more surreal scenes. They’re very evocative and great ways to communicate strong emotion. I walked away (closed the tab I was watching it on) wishing there had been more of that, but upon reflection I'm glad they were used sparingly and to great effect.
Sparingly and to great effect the dialogue was not. The dialogue largely functions to insist on a level of cohesion that simply does not exist, forcibly stitching one scene to a previous and future scene. The idea of an overarching plot is illusory, like red string between desperate newspaper clippings, the ideas I mentioned in the first paragraph, which the term illusory anchors to this one, is about deciding how I felt about something, but call-backs are not the same thing as cohesion, because this paragraph/scene doesn’t exist in its own right but as a crossroads tying other crossroads together: which as I’ve just demonstrated isn’t that complex or difficult, but it is obtuse.
I just remembered there’s a bunch of black and white scenes, again, which are all from Robert Downey jr.’s perspective. I’ve looked up some film interviews where the cast explain why it’s in black and white, just so there’s no ambiguity in your reading of the subtext. We wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong answer. We wouldn’t want anyone to think about it too hard. Doesn’t Cillian Murphy look pretty when he’s angsty, love it!
My thoughts deep coming back to David Lynch and twin peaks: large casts, long stories that don’t always lead anywhere, surreal scenes, interconnectedness and symbolism, and an interrogation of the American perspective. In the return there is even a scene with the trinity bomb test. There are a lot of parallels here, but they are parallels never intersecting or coming any closer to make a meaningful connection along any axis. I’m going to repeat this point in the next paragraph, and build on it a little.
I wanted to draw my conclusion by comparing the two, but they aren't in conversation with one another, just like Robert Downey jr.’s and Cillian Murphy's characters. In an attempt to structure the piece I felt the need to invent an antagonist for the film, to give it a sense of final conflict, but as with a fair few Christopher Nolan films these days, the real antagonistic force in the story was Oppenheimer all along.
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Fade
to black.
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